Women and the First World War

Many historians argue that the First World War
was a watershed for women in Britain. In reality, the development
of women's political and economic rights between 1914 and 1918 was
more complicated than such arguments allow. Some writers indeed
contend that the emancipatory effects of the Great War have been
vastly over-stated.

On the eve of war, the position of women in British society was
largely unfavourable. In the workplace, 'women's work' - most commonly,
domestic service - was poorly paid and considered separate from,
and inferior to, 'men's work'. Women were still expected to give
up work once they were married, to revert to their 'natural' roles
of wife, mother and housekeeper.

Despite or because of this situation, Britain was home to the most
active feminist movement in western Europe: the Women's Social and
Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903 by Emmeline
and Christabel Pankhurst and better known as the Suffragettes.
But many politicians, including prime minister H
H Asquith,
remained reluctant to support women's suffrage actively, using the
WSPU's violent methods to justify their position.

Women's response to war

The response of women to the outbreak of war in August 1914 was
mixed. A small number adopted a staunch anti-war position and later
worked with the conscientious objectors' movement. A much larger
minority threw their patriotic weight behind the Allied cause. The
Pankhursts reined in the WSPU's militant campaign, arguing that
the military triumph of a 'male nation' such as Germany would be
'a disastrous blow to the women's movement'. Government propaganda
made great play of patriotic women who harried their 'cowardly'
menfolk to enlist in the armed forces.

The majority of British women, however, fell somewhere between
these two extremes, viewing the war as an inevitability for which
they now had to make sacrifices.

New opportunities

The Pankhursts rightly saw that the war would
provide new employment opportunities for women. Just 2,000 had been
employed in government dockyards, factories and arsenals in July
1914, but by November 1918, this figure had risen to 247,000. The
number employed in the transport industry expanded by 555% to roughly
100,000. In other areas such as agriculture, banking and the civil
service, there were smaller, but still noticeable, increases. At
least one million women were formally added to the British workforce
between 1914 and 1918.

Photograph of women
making fuse heads

Women
for
armaments industry

Women to build
aeroplanes

Throughout
the war, however, both the government and the press tended, for
propaganda reasons, to exaggerate the extent to which women took
over men's jobs. Actual female dentists, barbers and architects
- all of which were featured on war savings postcards - were extremely
rare. Most male-dominated professions remained closed to women.
Even in areas where they were employed in large numbers, such as
munitions and transport, they were often treated as inferior, stop-gap
replacements for enlisted men. Moreover, women's wages, routinely
portrayed as 'high' in the wartime press, remained significantly
lower than those of their male counterparts.

Many women did find their wartime labour experiences in some way
'liberating', if only because it freed them from woefully paid jobs
in domestic service. But the comment made in 1918 by the women's
suffrage campaigner Millicent
Fawcett - that 'the war revolutionised the industrial position
of women' - should be treated with caution.

Reward and backlash

The Representation
of the People Act (February 1918) was widely portrayed
as a 'reward' for the contribution of female labour to the
war effort. However, while the Act granted the vote to all
men over 21 (subject to a six months' residency qualification),
only women over the age of 30 were given the same privilege.

Further proof of the limits of the wartime march towards
sexual equality was provided by the post-war backlash against
women's employment - in particular, against the continued
employment of married women. As soon as the conflict ended,
the number of women working in munitions factories and transport
fell away rapidly. Ex-servicemen reclaimed the jobs that had
been performed by women during the previous four years. Moreover,
even in long-standing bastions of female employment such as
the laundry industry, women now found themselves in competition
with disabled ex-servicemen.

As in France, the idea of women returning to their 'rightful'
domestic place was a prominent theme in post-war Britain.
Many of their undoubted advances between 1914 and 1918 were
thus only partial or temporary.